I think the xp decay thing is a really dumb idea

No, I did not try to bury you. I just made an counter argument that hard cap isn't the better alternative. Just because someone have disagreement with me, doesn't mean I want them to stop coming up with counter argument.

So mentioned 2 alternatives to the current skill decays:

1. Having skill decay exemption until a skill reaches GM. It's just been pointed out that people would just min/max at level 99 instead

2. Adding hard cap would just stop people from spending any more time on their character. In UO, it's quite a different design. You can get 5-6 characters in one account. So people can just start working on another character as they're done with the current one. In SotA, the game design seems to be more toward one character per one player. That was from what Richard mentioned during one of the telethon session when people asked about multiple characters and their virtue points.

 

I just pointed out that by your words that a hard cap is the same as decay. IMO decay is worse as people think they need to grind everytime they log in. when you said quote "That would be a valid point if the design intent is to prevent people from progress any further regardless of how much effort they are willing to put into their character progression." This means that that the average player ill always have a detriment, and that the people like themo (no ill will toward you) will always have the advantage. There is no leveling of the playing field between casual and hardcore. In my mind I know how this ends, and my rose colored glasses are broken and thrown away lol.

 

Is it wrong that a person who put more time and effort to spend on the game would progress further than those who don't? Also the skill decay scale to the total XP the person put into skills. So what Themo will pay upon his death wouldn't be the same as folks who can play only an hour or two each night. If a person can manage to earn 1 million XP and put into a skill (or more), why would be so hard to get 400 xp to keep up with the decay?

Yes, at some point people will be where the stuff they kill can no longer efficiently keep up with the decay. So they have to plan wisely on what to keep and what to drop. At least until there are new contents and harder mobs coming in to allow them to progress further at their pace. Having hard cap would prevent that from happening because people wouldn't go any further.

I am not saying that the current skill decay is the best solution and no further change is needed. At the same time, I am not convinced that adding skill decay exemption until GM or switching to hard cap would do any better. I would love to see more alternatives as people toss more thoughts into this, though.

If you think that hard cap is the golden solution to this problem, it's fine too. It's not up to me to change anyone opinions. We're all grown up adults here, everyone should be able to adapt/adjust/change/reject ideas and opinion at their own discretion.

Not sure what rose colored glasses broken mean, is that something from Oxygen channel? All my glasses are clear colored here.

 

Is it wrong...well thats all subjective. We can leave that to the latter interpretation. we cannot know if its wrong or right. What I can tell you is that if people that play the game think they have to grind every time they play the game in order to recoup what they have gained in the past is a negative. If they feel like they as a casual player need to redo what they have done just to keep up with the Jones is more like a job than a game. People that have the opportunity to play all the time everyday will hit that skill cap, and be effectively trying to gain what they lost also, albeit it will be a higher level than the average gamer. Right now port is favoring the elite few and not favoring the general masses who do not have that much time to play. I do not see a good outcome from this.

 

well very simply that is why is maxes out at 4 days loss max - -

They guy that plays every day and power games will never hit the 4 day max unless he does not die often and they guy that plays casually and smart when he lives for 4 days he will not lose anynmore .

Decay is fine

what is sad is that they started and continue a game that death is meaningless and players get more and more used to candy crush and not a game that has value to not only power gaming but death and all other aspects.

and when they try and implement meaningful aspect everyone cries to high heaven and they cave in.

Yes the game seems lopsided to power gamers and they should fix it but taking out decay is not the answer.

 

That's the perception issue right there, not the feature itself. People don't have to redo what they have done. Just 0.04% of what they have done. I am at level 67, most of my skills are at 60s. Have a few mins here and there play up to around an hour per day. On my lucky day, I got up to 2 hours. When I died after four-hour decay accrued, I lost 3k XP. I went to kill one group of elder wolves in Deep Ravenswood, I already got way more than 10k XP. If anything, my innate skills suck in XP way more faster than skill decay even before they reach level 40.

The current skills decay barely hit any casual players. A lot of complain seem come from folks who fear the feature for the sake of fear. Should there be hard cap in place, we will run into another perception issues, such as "game is too easy" or "running out of thing to do", which already happening even with skill decay is in place.

 

well I do understand what you are saying, but the fact is most people do not read or care. Perception is the whole premise. If people actually read or cared they would know this is a lord british game without handholding. They would know that the oracle is important and that the overland map has a reason. They would know about the virtues and not need or have to have other players explain the game to them. What we have now is a min max, MMO crowd that wants to teleport instantly to anywhere, to dance and be part of the Whole world event system which bypasses the in game local economies. We have lazy people that do not want to work for anything but expect everything. This is the cash cow that port wants. Instant gratification. Add on store items, dance parties la la la If you think that this instant gratification crowd that hates local economies and limited transportation will be in love will skill decay then I got to find a better prescription drug, because they will not like it, especially new MMO people that port is trying to bring in.

 

I' m a casual, and now it feels like getting XP is a tedious job. Exploring new zones, or even old zones has become bothersome in fearing of wasting time due to deaths. Where as the people with multiple GMs in my guild never take XP hits and die and run thru Rise like it's nothing. They also stopped doing dragon kills, and phoenix runs are on hold cause they can't be bothered anymore. So the little grouping we had has diminished in that aspect. I don't see this system being beneficial. If this was implemented to stop higher levels, it's not working. Low levels don't really feel the hit, it's the mid level players that are getting it the worst. I'd love to opt out of decay systems all together, those are my 2 cents.

 

Were you the one that lost 30k XP from skill decay upon death? How many GMs did you have again?

 

That was over multiple deaths in a row, not a single death. And I don't have any GMs atm, though I'm close with 1.

 

This is rediculous...

I just wish port would come out and say this is our Target of where we want the average player at? how many points do they want a casual player to be able to assign and maintain with this decay. If they do this right fine, there will be a range of assigned exp that players fall into based on this decay, but what is the Target? It's exactly the same as a hard cap but now you have to constantly maintain it with more grinding, instead of doing fun things.

Right now this penalizes casual players. Some one jumping on for an hour dying and doesn't want to spend 10 minutes of limited time running, loading scenes, and fighting bears to bring it back. The hour is done and 4 hours later they have another hour to Bam another max decay hit..

And for the "we need death to mean something?" Really? Losing exp means you have to grind more EXP that is not something meaningful that is just extra work that keeps you from the enjoyable aspects of this game that people want to play.

 

last time and I am done it was a system that should have been in place from the beginning as you can se everyone is whining because it was implemented bass ackwards. If they had started with it it would be nothing new.

Get over it, it is a consequence from dying, something to make death mean something and death is still a joke.

Devs keep it up keep working on making it balanced and make sure you do not cave in and take it away.

Death should mean something if it doesn't the game is just a joke.

 

Disclaimer
I am throwing around random numbers to make my point.

Hello lords and ladies.
I still don't understand why we don't have a finite XP pool.
Well yes, most of us prefer more freedom than less but I guess most of us understand the need for a limit of what a char can achieve skill wise .
Why don't we get a pool of 1mill XP and that's it?
Why do we have to cope with a wired decay system that nobody understands but everybody thinks it's unfair?
The average player should have 8 gms skills? Great. Just limit the XP pool to this amount + whatever the adjectant skills need to be worth something.
Hardcore players should get more? Fine, give them a 9th or even 10th gm skill set fixed to their playtime or whatever and let decay kick in for them from there.

 

There is a post on the player created resource forum where the OP use offline mode to figure out the XP needed to reach 100+ levels. Not all skills require the same amount of XP to approach the milestones. If the pool were to be limited, they would need to normalize the xp needed to reach certain levels for all skills, which will affect the skill progression difficulty as well. Not sure if that's better or worse, though.

 

There should just be a decay bar on the character sheet. For the first 1000 or 2000 skill points characters get no decay at all. After that the decay gets exponentially worse and players can choose their tolerance to decay.

New to medium players get no decay and power gamers can choose how much decay they want to endure.

 

Well every system is unfair and unbalanced at some point. And I guess all of them are complicated at the back end.
But why dose it have to be so complicated at the front end?
Why dose it have to be MY (read: the players) problem?
Creat something that I don't have to mathhammer every time I log on.

 

If you die and you get PISSED! The system is working as intended. If you die over and over again and get REALLY PISSED and come and complain on the forums, the game is working as intended. Your death now means something. Get over it. I remember losing all my acquired goods/loots in the old UO after hours of gaming in covetous caverns just to have a noob come along out of the shadows and loot my corpse before I could get back (in the old days, the goooood old days where things counted for something). That style gave me a rush when I was near death, it pushed my limits as a gamer to survive. It made me worry if there was a pk waiting in the shadows behind the stalagmytes, it MADE ME PLAY BETTAH! QQing about your lack of skill in surviving a game where you can kite everything and simply jump onto a rock to save yourself is pretty weaksauce. There is no reason you should be dying at all in this game, its actually too easy.
If you are causal and think you are suffering more than the power-gamer when you die, you are wrong. The penalties are the same for everyone. Saying you need a special category for casuals is called hand-holding. The power-gamer is definitely going to die more since he is playing more. The 4 hour thingy should be IN-GAME TIME if it isnt already, please correct me if I am wrong. Other than that, I wouldnt mind if they increased the penalty to 1% for skills that havent been used in the past 24hours with addition to the penalties already at hand. I think the decay should hurt more. This is just my honest opinion. kkthx

 

The main issue here is more to do with the perception rather than the actual execution at this point.

Consider if you have 7 GMs hypothetically, which let's say we round up the XP all of these skills needed to be GM level to 2 mil XP per skill (in reality, most of the skills actually require around 1.4 mil xp, some others require 4 mil). You would you have the total of 14 mil XP assigned to those skills. If you die at least once every 4 hours within 24 hours, you would lose 4 x (14 mil x 0.0004) = 22.4K XP as the maximum per 24 hour period. That could seem a lot, but if a person is capable of gaining 14 mil XP, why would 22.4K, which is 0.16% of the XP they accumulated in their overall game time, be so hard to get it back?

I am not saying that we should just suck it up and play as it is, but I would to know more details about the player play style, how they hunt, and how they often actually die. I myself do my own hunt for most of the time in the adventure zones where I know I won't be dying that often. At this point even if I die once for every 4 hours, I would still be able to progress beyond the 4-hour worth of skill decay within 10 minutes. That is the reason why I have not seen skill decay as a big issue for "casual players".

I recognize there may be others who think or experience the skill decay differently, which is why I would love to know more details if someone is willing to share. So perhaps we can see a better alternative solution that actually enhance the game play and balance the overall progression rather just changing how things work just for the sake of easing this perception.

 

Thus only the brave will profit... exactly how I like it. As long as the loot is worth it, this shouldnt be an issue.

 

You gain 0.01% decay per hour that you don't die up until 0.04% after 4 hours without dying. This invisible decay meter doesn't do anything to you until you next die. Upon dying after 4 hours without any other deaths, you will lose 0.04% of the applied XP for every skill you have. So if you have a GM skill (level 100) which takes at least 1.25 million applied XP to get, you'll only lose 500 XP for that skill. That means even if you had 100 different skills at level 100, you'd still only lose 50k total XP on death. That's an extremely forgiving mechanic. There's nothing to complain about really. You can make 50k XP in 20-30 minutes out in the Crag Foothills.